The Weekly Challenge

HEADLINES

Welcome to the Week #312 of The Weekly Challenge.

I wish all members who celebrate the month of Ramadan. May ALLAH s.w.t. bless you with peace, happiness and prosperity.

I would also like to congratulate all fellow Indians for Team India winning the Champions Trophy 2025 for the second time. It was a close match, I was glued to the TV all Sunday till the last ball. Team New Zealand played well and gave a tough fight, I must admit.

Back to the main topics, welcome back Kaushik Tunuguntla after a long break. Thanks for your contributions in Perl and Python. Also the bonus blog post. I hope to see you more regular this time, no pressure though.

I would like to mention one member, Luca Ferrari, for consistent contributions. Having said, I noticed in recent times we miss the bonus guest language contributions. I hope to see more from him.

There is another member, Adam Russell, who is on/off as far as participation is concerned. However when ever he does and he makes a very big impact. Thank you for contributions in Perl and Prolog. Thank you for quality blog post. I loved the use of pack/unpack with such an ease.

Similarly, Ali Moradi for creating clean and cute solutions in Perl. Bonus contributions in Java and Modula-3.

How can I miss Raku master Arne Sommer for creative blog post every week. This week post was no different.

There are few silent players who impressed me with the energy to keep it going for so long e.g. Roger Bell_West, Ulrich Rieke, Athanasius, Peter Campbell Smith, W. Luis Mochan, Mark Anderson, Wanderdoc, Thomas Kohler and many more.

I liked the nature of weekly challenge where you are not bound to it. You are the boss and you decide when you want to contribute. What matters most is the quality contributions. I noticed the GitHub repository for the Team PWC contribution is growing very fast. It is also very popular outside of the camp. As of today, we have got 187 stars, very impressive. I hope to get over 200 mark soon. I would keep the collection of knowledge for ever and for next generation to learn from it.

I noticed lots of different flavour of regex, some of them are listed below:

Niels van Dijke

$str =~ s/$re/sum(values %+)/ge;

Kjetil Skotheim

pop() =~ s/./chr(ord$&^32)/ger

E. Choroba

join "", map sum(split //), $str =~ /(.{1,$int})/g;

Jorg Sommrey

$str =~ s/(\p{Lu})|(\p{Ll})/$1 ? lc($1) : uc($2)/egr

Jaldhar H. Vyas

$_ = shift; s/(.)/uc $1 eq $1 ? lc $1: uc $1/ge; say

Matthias Muth

$str =~ s< ([a-z]) | [A-Z] >{ $1 ? uc( $& ) : lc( $& ) }xegr;

Robbie Hatley

y/[a-zA-Z]/[A-Za-z]/,print while <>

Wanderdoc

$str =~ s/(\p{Uppercase}) | (\p{Lowercase}) /defined $1 ? lc $1 : uc $2/xeg;

Last but not least, a gentle reminder to Laurent Rosenfeld and E. Choroba to get back to me with your PayPal account so that prize money can be transferred to you.

Last 5 weeks mainstream contribution stats. Thank you Team PWC for your support and encouragements.


`Week`	`Perl`	`Raku`	`Blog`
`307`	44	20	12
`308`	44	22	16
`309`	50	21	19
`310`	44	19	13
`311`	40	21	16

Last 5 weeks guest contribution stats. Thank you each and every guest contributors for your time and efforts.


`Week`	`Guests`	`Contributions`	`Languages`
`307`	15	61	23
`308`	14	56	21
`309`	13	56	21
`310`	11	44	16
`311`	11	46	17

TOP 10 Guest Languages

Do you see your favourite language in the Top #10? If not then why not contribute regularly and make it to the top.

 1. Python     (3239)
 2. Rust       (860)
 3. Ruby       (777)
 4. Haskell    (755)
 5. Lua        (694)
 6. C++        (595)
 7. C          (590)
 8. JavaScript (540)
 9. Go         (464)
10. BQN        (420)

Blogs with Creative Title

1. Lower the Upper Sums! by Adam Russell.

2. Upper Group by Arne Sommer.

3. Flip Groups by Jorg Sommrey.

4. Switch Case? by Kaushik Tunuguntla.

5. two lines by Luca Ferrari.

6. Up and Down and Round and Round by Matthias Muth.

7. gROUP dIGIT sUM by Peter Campbell Smith.

8. Lower the Sum by Roger Bell_West.

GitHub Repository Stats

1. Commits: 42,599 (`+91`)

2. Pull Requests: 11,675 (`+34`)

3. Contributors: 258 (`+1`)

4. Fork: 325 (`+2`)

5. Stars: 187 (`+1`)

With start of Week #268, we have a new sponsor Lance Wicks until the end of year 2025. Having said we are looking for more sponsors so that we can go back to weekly winner. If anyone interested please get in touch with us at perlweeklychallenge@yahoo.com. Thanks for your support in advance.

RECAP

Quick recap of The Weekly Challenge - 311 by Mohammad Sajid Anwar.

PERL REVIEW

If you missed any past reviews then please check out the collection.

RAKU REVIEW

If you missed any past reviews then please check out the collection.

CHART

Please take a look at the charts showing interesting data.

I would like to THANK every member of the team for their valuable suggestions. Please do share your experience with us.

NEW MEMBERS

Please find out How to contribute?, if you have any doubts.

Please try the excellent tool EZPWC created by respected member Saif Ahmed of Team PWC.

GUESTS

Please check out the guest contributions for the Week #311.

Please find past solutions by respected guests. Please share your creative solutions in other languages.

Task 1: Minimum Time

Submitted by: Mohammad Sajid Anwar

You are given a typewriter with lowercase english letters a to z arranged in a circle.

Task 1

Typing a character takes 1 sec. You can move pointer one character clockwise or anti-clockwise.

The pointer initially points at a.

Write a script to return minimum time it takes to print the given string.

Example 1

Input: $str = "abc"
Output: 5

The pointer is at 'a' initially.
1 sec - type the letter 'a'
1 sec - move pointer clockwise to 'b'
1 sec - type the letter 'b'
1 sec - move pointer clockwise to 'c'
1 sec - type the letter 'c'

Example 2

Input: $str = "bza"
Output: 7

The pointer is at 'a' initially.
1 sec - move pointer clockwise to 'b'
1 sec - type the letter 'b'
1 sec - move pointer anti-clockwise to 'a'
1 sec - move pointer anti-clockwise to 'z'
1 sec - type the letter 'z'
1 sec - move pointer clockwise to 'a'
1 sec - type the letter 'a'

Example 3

Input: $str = "zjpc"
Output: 34

Task 2: Balls and Boxes

Submitted by: Mohammad Sajid Anwar

There are $n balls of mixed colors: red, blue or green. They are all distributed in 10 boxes labelled 0-9.

You are given a string describing the location of balls.

Write a script to find the number of boxes containing all three colors. Return 0 if none found.

Example 1

Input: $str = "G0B1R2R0B0"
Output: 1

The given string describes there are 5 balls as below:
Box 0: Green(G0), Red(R0), Blue(B0) => 3 balls
Box 1: Blue(B1) => 1 ball
Box 2: Red(R2) => 1 ball

Example 2

Input: $str = "G1R3R6B3G6B1B6R1G3"
Output: 3

The given string describes there are 9 balls as below:
Box 1: Red(R1), Blue(B1), Green(G1) => 3 balls
Box 3: Red(R3), Blue(B3), Green(G3) => 3 balls
Box 6: Red(R6), Blue(B6), Green(G6) => 3 balls

Example 3

Input: $str = "B3B2G1B3"
Output: 0

Box 1: Green(G1) => 1 ball
Box 2: Blue(B2)  => 1 ball
Box 3: Blue(B3)  => 2 balls

Last date to submit the solution 23:59 (UK Time) Sunday 16th March 2025.